I love CouchDB, but I love the CouchDB community even more. I think we made the important decision to cultivate community right from the start. One of the key components in getting that right turns out to be the concept of a community gatekeeper, or steward. Someone to guide things back in the right direction when they get off-track. Someone to set an example. On the very few occasions someone has threatened the atmosphere on the lists and in the IRC channel, it has been nice to see people defend it with passion and with humility. When those people see how things work here, and how committed we are to keeping the grass green and not letting the project become mired by useless arguments and petty aggression, they either adjust or they leave.
Perhaps rather than producing wisdom, crowds encourage demagogy, regurgitation of home truths, and petty agression/pedantry unless they are encouraged to channel their energy in other directions. The contention is that they are never self-regulating (even if you give them the tools to do so), but require intervention and moderation to remain cohesive, productive communities.
Some interesting lessons in here for communities like HN/SO/Reddit/SD etc. which rely on crowd moderation and technical measures to try to guide a community. When dealing with a large enough community, that can break down as enough new members arrive to subsume the older culture completely in a small amount of time, and any technical measure you think of can be subverted by those willing to put in the time to do so. I think reddit's approach here of splitting the community up into smaller niche groups is really interesting, but IMO they arrived at it too late to save their community overall.
> I think reddit's approach here of splitting the community up into smaller niche groups is really interesting, but IMO they arrived at it too late to save their community overall.
But does the "community overall" need any saving?
The only things that keep reddit together as a nominal community are the crappy, spammy, default subreddits. If not for those subreddits, there would be little overlap between those who subscribe to CS subreddits and those who subscribe to cooking or literature or photography subreddits. In other words, all the good stuff is already highly fragmented, and reddit as a whole is a "community" only in the sense that it's under the same domain name.
I wouldn't miss much if reddit's "community overall" simply disintegrated in favor of even more fragmentation. What's wrong with having a million and five communities instead of one, if small and mid-sized communities in fact work better than large ones? Crowdsourcing might work best at a certain size and level of engagement, and the optimal size might be smaller than what your company's CFO wants you to believe. Yeah, it's not easy for an online business nowadays to make a neat profit unless they command a humongous "community". But the sweet thing about ASF is that they don't depend on having a lot of people see ads on their website, so they can optimize for effective community governance.
I personally think one of the benefits of reddit is the fact that you have access to essentially unlimited forums with the same identity. Oftentimes I am working/pondering something and I'd like to ask someone involved in that specific community a question. Without a "reddit-style" identity system (I know there are "security concerns", etc) it looks like I need another username and password for this niche phpbb forum. I think the reddit community lowers the barrier of online discussion to a degree that if I wanted to I'm one post away from hopping to another niche community to ask a question.
Yep, I like the idea of reddit-style online identity. It's almost effortless to create dozens of them, you can use them in any subreddit, and you don't even need an e-mail address to sign up.
Hopefully, if & when everyone starts using Persona, it will be nearly as simple to start using a random website as it is to join a random subreddit, and we will finally be able to stop being members of excessively large "communities" like reddit and fb.
I'm not sure you can separate out opinions easily from actions/decisions to spend money, and I don't find the idea of a rational market or a rational crowd at all persuasive. I'd say how they spend their money/resources has always been intimately connected with their opinions and (crucially) how they shared them. A few examples of the irrationality of crowds (NB I'm not saying they're always irrational, just that they're rarely rational/wise):
The expedition to Sicily by Athens in 413 BC
The run up in the Facebook stock price on IPO day
Widespread investments in failsafe CDOs pre the crash of 2008
If crowds have any wisdom, it dissipates pretty quickly when they gather and start sharing opinions.
Perhaps rather than producing wisdom, crowds encourage demagogy, regurgitation of home truths, and petty agression/pedantry unless they are encouraged to channel their energy in other directions. The contention is that they are never self-regulating (even if you give them the tools to do so), but require intervention and moderation to remain cohesive, productive communities.
Some interesting lessons in here for communities like HN/SO/Reddit/SD etc. which rely on crowd moderation and technical measures to try to guide a community. When dealing with a large enough community, that can break down as enough new members arrive to subsume the older culture completely in a small amount of time, and any technical measure you think of can be subverted by those willing to put in the time to do so. I think reddit's approach here of splitting the community up into smaller niche groups is really interesting, but IMO they arrived at it too late to save their community overall.